Page 6 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

The boar stares at her, narrow set eyes unblinking behind the wicked tusks, one of which is pinked with Cat’s blood.

COME ON! Cat screams and takes another step forward.

The boar huffs, shakes its tusks left and right, like it’s loosening up for what is to come. Then it digs its hooves in and kicks into a run, But not towards Cat. It runs off at an angle, towards the donkey rhubarb. Towards its piglets, into the green, and out of our lives. Cat drops to one knee and turns and looks at me.

You OK? she says.

I can’t breathe properly. I’m still too scared of what I thought was going to happen to Cat. I just hold up my hands, the one trying to stop the bleeding in the other.

Cal looks down at her side which is now a sheet of blood from just below her armpit to hip.

We’re OK, she says. But you’re going to have to sew me up.

Somehow, despite everything we’re both grinning. Maybe shock is like that.

How? I say.

I’ll show you, she says. We’ll do your hand first. It’ll hurt.

It already hurts, I say. But I don’t mind.

And that was the truth. Hurting meant we were both still alive. And that’s how we learned to clean wounds and sew them up tight so blood wouldn’t leak out or germs get in, and that’s how come down there is always known as Stitch Country and also why we don’t go down there any more. Because that boar let us go, maybe because it recognised a similar force of nature to itself in Cat, but also maybe we might just have been lucky – and we never like to push our luck. Because even though we don’t believe in it, that’s how it runs out, Cat always said.

Correctly, as it turns out.

So I lie in the shadowless dark remembering all this, feeling the raised line of scar tissue on my hand and just listen to Cat breathe, which is how I soothe myself back to sleep when I wake like this.

The only other sound from inside the Bunker is the drip of the overflow pipe on the water-catcher in the kitchen. It must be raining outside. I decide the dream can’t have been a really bad one because it hasn’t left the usual unsettling aftertaste in my brain. Normally, a jolting nightmare makes me worry about the day ahead, like it’s a warning of something nasty that’s going to happen. Cat says that’s stupid magical thinking and that’s not how the real world works at all – which is usually by accident, sometimes by planning but never, ever because a spooky dream foretold it. Cat always sounds so sure of what she’s saying when she speaks that I stopped telling her about my forebodings a long time ago.

It wouldn’t make her any less twitchy to know how often I’m right, even if the bad thing is a small one like hitting your thumb with a hammer or a big one like losing your favourite knife. Cat thinks that sort of stuff is just coincidence. Sometimes I agree with her, but those times are usually in the daylight. At night? I’m not so sure. At night, in the dark, it’s easier to believe in things that aren’t quite so rational.

As I lie there and let my thoughts get less jangled from waking up with such a start, I decide the shriek I heard wasn’t in my dream. As I replay it in my memory it’s more like the scream a rabbit makes when it’s in pain or distress. Maybe there are foxes hunting out there, I think.

Maybe it’s just foxes in the rain.

And then I must have fallen asleep.

Chapter 4

Limani Beach, Lesvos, Greece

The Boy and the Girl – Year 11 AG

The boy with the jumping dog, once frozen in the air by a photograph taken more than a decade ago on the much more northerly beach in the Hebrides is not a boy any more and the dog is long gone and much lamented in the way of all well-loved childhood dogs. The boy-now-a-man sits at a battered, blue-painted table beneath the gnarled olive trees at the back of the beach and watches the sun set over the Limani.

His phone is propped against an empty beer bottle with a bright red A on the label. The girl who took the photograph is now a woman, but her face, on the phone’s screen, is still a riot of freckles. She’s in a moving vehicle, leaning against the side door as a brown landscape flies past. She looks tired, but happy.

“And Skalachori?” she says. “What’s changed?”

“The shop’s closed. For good this time they say. Have to go to Kalloni and stock up. But the old women are still running the bakery, so you’ll get your cake-fix, don’t worry.”

“I love those old women,” she says.

“And they love the bakery,” he says. “They’ll keep it going till they drop, I reckon.”

“Well,” she says. “Nothing lasts for ever. We’ll just have to enjoy it while it’s there…”

He drinks more beer and squints at the sun, which is now touching the line where the Aegean meets the sky, the golden light bouncing flatly off its surface somehow making the gentle heave of the waveless sea seem dark and thick as motor oil.